Timothy K. Beal

1CSome scholars of religion may balk at my integration of personal history in this book, not to mention my explicit religious interest in its argument, 1D writes Timothy Beal in his long note to chapter one of this somewhat unusual book, which combines memoir relating to the Bible with speculation about the Bible 19s place in modern society 14including a contemporary look at the 1Cvalue-added 1D industry not only of Bible commentary but also 1CBiblezines 1D that are aimed at the young and biblically illiterate 14with a history of Bible publication both before and after the printing press. Beal, who reads both Greek and Hebrew and sometimes gives his own translations of the texts, also describes the historical development of the Bible, concluding that it is not so much a book as a library: Both ancient synagogues and early Christian churches did not have Bibles so much as they had collections of the separate 1Cbooks 1D that now make up the Bible. It was not until rather late that anyone tried to put all of the books of the Bible into one volume.

Beal uses a great deal of humor in this book. For example, 1CThe End of the Word as We Know It 1D (a parody of both the saying and song title, 1CEnd of the World as We Know It 1D) is not only the title of part one of this book but a recurring gag throughout. In describing the popular use of the Bible for divination, Beal recalls the time in his own adolescence when he asked, 1CDoes Joanne like me? 1D Then he flipped through the Bible until he stopped and let his finger fall on Deuteronomy 23.1: 1CHe that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD. 1D Chapter and section headings are often puns. A section of chapter eight is entitled 1CLoose Canon, 1D a pun that could have many meanings, and Beal just might mean all of them at once.

But all is not pop culture and jests. Beal has some serious points to make. A recurring theme is a critique of the limiting belief that the Bible is a book of answers that is consequently intimidating to anyone who tries to pick it up and read it. Do I understand it, people wonder anxiously, and if not is there something wrong with me?

1CThe Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions, 1D Beal teaches. That is, each book of the Bible revisits the themes and subject matter of earlier books and does not always arrive at the same understanding. Usually doesn 19t, as a matter of fact. Beal finds this liberating rather than discomfiting. He rejects as self defeating the views of those (both believers and unbelievers) who insist that the Bible must stand or fall on its inerrancy. No, he demurs; rather, to expect the Bible to speak with one voice and to answer all questions with one sure answer is to expect the Bible to be what it was never meant to be. The Bible is polyvocal, not univocal. It is a collection of many voices, often in dispute with each other rather than harmony.

Beal counts four or five different accounts of creation in the Bible. These are often contradictory, and two are both found in the first book, Genesis. Beal points out that the ancient editors of the Genesis were not stupid; they knew they were stitching together two contradictory accounts of creation, one after the other. Obviously that is what they intended to do. More contentiously, the Book of Job provides an argument against Deuteronomy 19s declaration that bad things only happen to bad people. Job is sometimes regarded as a contrary point of view that somehow snuck into the Bible when no one was looking, but Beal recognizes that its contrariness is not that unusual in the Bible, where books regularly take different positions on similar issues or explicitly re-reinterpret the meanings of earlier books. 1CIn its hosting of disagreement, the canon of the Bible remains open, inviting us to enter, and add our voices to the ongoing conversation, 1D he says. Beal carries this conceit to a radical extent. He seems to be saying that everyone in the Bible is reinterpreting each other, so we might as well join in the act.

Beal looks at the present and future and sees the possibility that the Bible could be re-envisioned through the Internet where all texts can be connected hypertextually, collaboratively invested with new contexts and meanings. 1CTo some, this may look like doomsday, the end of the Word set in the context of the end of the world. And yet, ironically, it also looks very like the scriptural culture of early Christianity 1D where scattered communities shared various books with each other and copied and commented and edited.

Beal takes the Bible as a post-modernist text, arguing that it has already deconstructed itself, but this attitude may go too far in overlooking the fact that the ancient authors and editors had their own meanings in mind 14meanings that are neither entirely unknowable nor of lesser value than all readers 19 interpretations; understanding as much as we can about the earlier intent of biblical authors and editors is crucial if we are to get something of real value out of the Bible rather than merely mirroring our own (or someone else 19s) opinions and prejudices. The meanings intended by the authors and editors should be acknowledged as the starting point for our understanding of the history and thought behind these texts.

Beal is right that there are more questions in the Bible than there are answers, but within reasonable parameters there can be wrong answers, as Beal concedes, for example, in his discussion of how the Matthean proof text for the virgin birth was indeed based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew word 1Calmah 1D which means 1Cyoung woman 1D but was translated in the Septuagint or Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures as 1Cvirgin. 1D When a revised translation of the Bible acknowledged this about a century ago, many conservative clergymen saw red and rejected the new-fangled translation. Throughout their history, Christians have probably been particularly egregious 14in comparison to all those who eccentrically reinterpret scriptures 14in interpreting the Bible in illegitimate ways in order to justify their doctrines after the fact, the prime case being Matthew 19s 14and many other Christians 19 14 reinterpretation of Isaiah and some other Jewish texts to make them speak about the Messiah when they clearly do not. This may not have been done with intentional deceit in most cases, but it was a wish fulfillment done with so little respect for the original intent of the earlier authors that it impoverishes Christianity to the extent that some Christians 19 faith is thus hanged from a single falsification of the original text. However, Luke does not rely on the same proof texts that Matthew does 14another example of polyvocality: if you don 19t like Matthew, read Luke, instead.… (más)

Beal has returned to the theme of the Bible’s role in Western (specifically American) culture with this newest work, focusing here on its contradictory status. While 78% of Americans would claim that the Bible is the literal “Word of God,” and 65% that the Bible “answers all or most of the basic questions of life,” a 2005 study revealed that more than half of these self-identified “Bible-believing” Christians had not participated in any sort of Bible study or Sunday school program in the last month. We have then a cultural conundrum of high biblical reverence but low (and sinking quickly) biblical literacy.
For Beal, this indicates that the Bible has taken on a deformed role as a cultural “icon”…the “Book” that has all the answers to life’s problems. In probably the most fascinating section of the book, Beal then goes on to explore how this iconic force has been expanded and reinforced by the Bible publication industry, which has seen a veritable explosion of, for lack of a better term, “niche” Bibles tailored to all imaginable (and some unimaginable) Bible audiences. Or, as Beal frames the controlling question: “What is the cultural meaning of “the Bible” that a publisher claims when it publishes something like The Hot Rodder’s Bible?”
Beal is certainly right that the Bible has slowly morphed into a marketable “product,” carrying with it all the fraught egocentrism of the American consumerist mindset. Instead of readers “conforming” themselves to the difficult and sometimes off-putting claims and concerns of Scripture, we simply now shop for the edition that best meets our felt needs (usually for encouragement and affirmation rather than exhortation or, worse, correction and discipline).
Beal is also right that we need to recover a greater sense of the Bible’s “strangeness” and cultural distance from our moment. He especially sees evangelicalism as trapped between a desire for the “preservation” of Scripture and “popularization” of it. For his part, Beal doesn’t think we can have it both ways. Either we are true to the alien nature of much of Scripture, or we end up deforming it into the theological equivalent of the American “hot dog.”
I agree with Beal’s assessment of the issues, but I differ (strongly) with his chosen answers and solutions. In brief, instead of opting to say that American culture has misread the biblical answers to our most pressing dilemmas, he goes a step further in claiming that we have misread the Bible as ever having any “answers” in the first place!
For Beal, this view of Scripture is idolatrous and bound to fail in the ever-shifting winds of cultural change. And his solution to fixing this problematic view is to deconstruct our concept of “the Bible” as a coherent and fixed document. Canon has always been debated; it never was truly fixed. (In his view, Athanasius’ Easter Letter is more a testament to a still-“open” canon rather than a “closed” one.)
However, this is where I begin to find some fundamental contradictions in Beal’s position. First of all, he wants to claim that our idea of a “Bible” (as a single collection of authoritative writings) would have been entirely foreign to the earliest Christians, where each Christian community had its own collection of writings it considered authoritative, usually a mix of canonical and non-canonical works. However, he also admits that all Christian communities used the Jewish Scriptures…though he seems to miss that this is indeed a “universal” canon of those communities (i.e., a “Bible” of the sort he is trying to deconstruct).
Even more problematic, however, is this statement:
“These libraries were never closed or fixed, but were interconnected with the libraries of other communities, so that texts flowed and morphed within larger, non-centralized social networks. Not unlike the emerging digital network culture of today.”
That statement is, in my opinion, frankly damning of Beal’s entire approach. In all of his touting of the importance of retrieving the “strangeness” of the Bible, he is simply advocating a view of Scripture that aligns it more closely with the contemporary hypertextual experience of the digital age. Has Beal really “recovered” a more authentic view of Christian Scripture…or has he simply “remade” the Bible in the image of our digital age? Has he really destroyed the idol of bibliolatry…or has he simply fashioned a new image more palatable to postmoderns? My inclination says he has done the latter in both cases.

To be honest, I found most of his “evidences” of contradictions within Scripture tired and tiresome. There are only so many times one can read about the differences between the Genesis creation accounts without becoming convinced that too much is being made out of them…that we find the differences because that is what we are looking for rather than searching more carefully for commonalities and connections.
Finally, his argument that the Bible is a “library” rather than a “book” seems to be an exercise in missing the point of his own metaphor. True, a library contains many different points of view (and I’m not disputing that this is part of the fabric of Scripture), but every library is organized according to an overarching system that determines what is (and what is not) included in it. That is, there is a greater unity that defines the “library” as a “library.”
Essentially what Beal offers here is a vision of the “Bible without canon.” It is, as the subtitle declares, only an “accidental” Book with no real coherence or meaning of its own…only the meaning that we choose to attribute to its various parts. To use Beal’s own metaphor against him, it’s a library with no catalogue.
We are a long way from the fascinating insights and confessional tone of Beal’s “Roadside Religion.” Was it informative? Yes. Was it convincing? No, not to this reader.… (más)